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Tuesday, September 19, 2017

A Mod You Can't Regulate or Tax as Such

(I spend far too much time on this vaping shit...  Oh well.  And yes, Virginia, your DIY mod is free and clear - but this is not about that.  I want to see end-user, finished, ready-to-go products sold in stores everywhere that have the same legal properties as home built DIY.  And, yes, sales tax cannot be avoided here.)

As I discussed in the last post I am now making an open source "battery pod" (OSM1 is now "the battery pod.")  The pod will probably support a deans connector, a USB-A female connector and a 510 connector.

This device is not and will not be, in my opinion, a thing which can be regulated as a "tobacco product" nor is it, in my opinion, taxable as a "vaping product."

Why?

Because it's dual use.

A battery pod for charging a cell phone AND 510 flashlight AND it's up to the user as to how they, the user, not me or anyone else who makes one of these, use it.

Here's the idea (lower left):


Or this (my big ugly OSM1 mod)...



Again, you can see the little USB connector on the lower left.

I uploaded a new case in ShopBot format (basically set of CNC commands) under the file names n2*.sbp on the GitHub.  I am redoing the big orange version above to add a USB as well (it's under analytics2.ai).


(Red = V (sign) cut, black = alignment holes, blue = holes, green = cut out with tabs)

(Also looks like I have found at least one enthusiastic user!)

In order to deliver power at 5V 2A via the USB A female I'm going to try out this buck power converter.

I should have this put together and working, i.e., charging my phone, next week.

So the question is "what is my gadget now?"

It's a USB battery pack and has at least two uses: one is to charge my phone, the other to run my R/C helicopter.

Perhaps I can even vape with it... or use it for a 510 flashlight module...???

SIDE NOTE:

Before we go further there's a general problem with doing this in "the real world," e.g. China.

Everybody and their brother uses boost power supplies to create steady voltages for powering things, e.g., mods, robots, etc.  Steady means "continuous" DC voltage.  I get why but it makes no sense for certain applications, e.g., a flash light or vaping, where you can more efficiently switch the power on and off via a square wave (PWM).

So for this design you could tap off the batteries before my Arduino PWM and run the little buck converter to down sample the 8.2V-7.4V from the batteries to 5V @ 2A.  This particular buck supply shouldn't draw any current unless it's in use, i.e., charging a phone.

The four 18650's in the big orange case give me plenty of phone charging power.

Next is to put some weaponized frosting into the mix...

The Chinese can't really do this because they have so much invested in boost-style power supply systems for things (of course they can but will they catch on?)  No one in China pays the kind of taxes we pay to have to vape.

BACK TO THE MAIN IDEA:

Going back to the original post on this we can use the radio to tell our phone if our charging pod is running out of power.

We can take this all the way up to Facebook if we want, i.e., data from by battery pod moved wirelessly up into the internets...





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